


Sun Center

by LilydaleXF



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s10e03 Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster, F/M, Pre-The X-Files: I Want To Believe (2008), Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 07:03:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10634733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilydaleXF/pseuds/LilydaleXF
Summary: When Scully walks into the X-Files office in "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster" and sees Mulder throwing pencils at the I Want To Believe poster on the wall, why does she say "What are you doing tomyposter?" How was it hers when it was only ever mentioned on the show (in "Chinga" and "Alpha") as being Mulder's?Set sometime between "The Truth" and "I Want To Believe" after Mulder and Scully have moved into their rural house.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks: To Anjou for being helpful and listening to me meander on about this story. Also to @the-pink-posse for making [this Tumblr post](http://the-pink-posse.tumblr.com/post/156847349665/5x10-ii-10x03) and unknowingly inspiring this story.

The first time Scully walks into his study after his redecoration, she only has eyes for him. She's in a soft, lavender-colored robe and carrying a mug of something hot. Steam rises from the cup and mists through her hair as she leans down unnecessarily close and sets the mug in front of him on his desk.

Still hunched over invading his space, Mulder feels her breath on his cheek as she says, "I made tea, but I think I'd rather warm up this morning by getting back in bed."

As he instinctively nods a silent "okay" before entirely realizing what she said, she's already walking out of the room with her hands in front of her and hidden from him. She's sliding the robe's belt out of its tied bow, he realizes, as he sees its loose ends fall just as she leaves his sight. "Losing the robe is no way to stay warm," he thinks, "she doesn't even have hot tea anymore." He quickly slides torn strips of newspaper as bookmarks into the books he's scattered around him in research before getting up from his desk chair. 

"You know the best way to get warm?" he asks her moments later as he pushes the bedroom door closed.

* * *

The next time Scully comes into his study, days later, he starts explaining articles he's been reading about the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp as soon as he sees she's nearby. She hasn’t even had a chance to open her mouth and indicate the reason for this rare appearance in his cluttered lair.

"He's six or seven feet tall and covered in scales, Scully, and he roams the sewers when he's not in the swamp. Could a lost defective lizard in a sewer mutate into a Lizard Man like the fluke became the Fluke Man?"

She sighs. "How many times have I told you I could live without hearing about that fluke thing ever again?"

"Many," he says with a smile. He hates that fluke thing too but is endlessly amused by the way she still, so many years later, won't let go her adamant disdain of that case. "Which is why I'm not talking about that now but instead asking you about the lizard thing."

He sees her eyes flick over to the "I Want To Believe" poster newly added to the wall in his redecoration, but it seems like it may be more a glance away from him in hopes of avoiding engagement in this topic of conversation than a recognition of the new poster that's really something old.

Having seemingly decided on a plan of reply, she says, "There is no seven foot tall Lizard Man living in South Carolina, Mulder, so I don't think we need to test the boundaries of biology determining its evolutionary path."

"But Scully--"

" _But Scully_ nothing," she interrupts. "Until we see it with our own eyes, and maybe not even then, there is no Lizard Man. I've admitted that there's a Fluke Man and acknowledged his apparent radioactive mutation origins. That will have to suffice for now. Work from there. And clean up your breakfast dishes before today becomes tomorrow."

Mulder hasn't stopped smiling. She takes every ridiculous thing he says seriously, but that's not the only reason he loves her beyond what he has ever been able to express.

* * *

A couple weeks after he followed the Lizard Man trail as far as it would go, which was not far, Mulder notices something amiss when he steps into his study. He was actually out of the house for hours the night before and slept in more than usual, but even he's right-minded enough this morning to notice a change. Tacked onto the bulletin board next to his recently purchased poster is a pair of inverted flowers hanging as if to dry.

Scully obviously ventured into the room before he awoke, sneaking a memory onto the wall before she left for another long day of work at the hospital.

He'd stunned her by offering to go with her to a job-related fundraising dinner she had to attend. She hadn't asked him. Instead she merely mentioned one day the week before how she would be home late that particular evening, speaking to him as she made note of the event on the calendar hanging on the side of the fridge.

(The calendar is a promotional advert for a feed company and features monthly pictures of baby animals. It came in the mail addressed by name to the house's former occupant though it also said "or current resident" on the label. "We are resident, and we cannot throw baby cats into the garbage," he scolded last January when Scully had tried to throw the calendar away while going through a pile of mail. "Kittens, Mulder, kittens," she groaned as she capitulated and stuck a magnet to the calendar, which now gets daily use.)

At the dinner it felt like people were staring at them. He didn't say anything to Scully, though. He was wary of sounding paranoid (or, more paranoid), as well as sensitive to not making her feel more self-conscious of being noticed than she already was because, as she had noted to him earlier, she was wearing a dress instead of the practical trousers and standard lab coat her colleagues had only ever seen her in before tonight. The dress is midnight blue and, although it's generally staid and conservatively cut, it has lattice work around her neck that dips low. It's the sort of dress that would hold him rapt if she wasn't already the sun center of his orbit.

The rest of their table had cleared after dinner to peruse the dessert buffet. She leaned over to him and whispered, "People are intrigued by you, you know. They've been staring."

"I thought I was being paranoid about it," he voiced after all.

"I think people thought I was making you up. And you look sharp in that suit."

"Should we go mingle more, further prove I'm not only real and here with you but can converse?"

She shook her head no and said, "I'm small-talked out. I just want to sit here for a few more minutes before an acceptable amount of time has passed post-dinner for an exit."

They sat quietly. He could tell that people still kept stealing glances their way. "Here," he said, drawing a small vase of flowers closer to them. He plucked out two stems, putting one through his suit jacket buttonhole and sliding another through the lattice by her clavicle. "Everybody can see now we're a set, like one of those memory games with all the paired cards."

"Mulder!" she squawked but with a hint of a grin, "this is not prom!"

"Well obviously, or you would've been wearing a corsage all along."

She slipped both flowers off their clothes, glancing around furtively as she put a hand on his leg under the tablecloth. "But no prom doesn't mean there still won't be a scandalous after party."

"That's it, we're leaving right now," he announced accurately.

Now, the pair of flowers hang on the wall of his study because Scully somehow kept them safe and left them for him. All day long they kept catching his eye, and he maybe wouldn't be able to accept the heated reality of the prior night but for their presence. When he hears her come home from work and putter in the kitchen and then in the living room before heading upstairs, he feels complete and matched again with her near, renewed with purpose as he continues reading and thinking along his hopeful path to comprehension as the moon glows.

* * *

Some number of days after their dinner out, he turns his head as he reaches for a file cabinet while sitting at his desk and sees Scully propped up against the frame of his study door. Her arms are folded, and hair has fallen around her face in wisps out of a ponytail.

"Scully?" he asks in query of her presence.

"I wondered how long it would take you to turn around."

"And?"

"I no longer remember what time my watch said when I started standing here. I think it may have started with a nine."

He truthfully has no idea what time it is other than "it's dark outside" so doesn't know how to take her pronouncement any way other than with the weariness that imbued it.

She tilts her head curiously to the side, away from the door. "What is it you're doing in here, Mulder? Have been doing in here for days, weeks, longer?"

He looks at her wide-eyed and unblinking and waves his hands obviously around at all the stacked books and papers, the printed articles and photographs tacked to bulletin boards, the non-negligible collection of magazines with relatively recent M. F. Luder bylines.

She mirrors his look but her arms remain folded over her stomach.

"This," he lamely adds out loud in the quiet that remains after his hands still.

She sighs a heavy breath and closes her eyes in a calm, slow blink. "That?" she asks, flicking her chin in the direction of the hanging poster. "Research? Searching? Still wanting to believe above all else?"

"No. Yes. It's not what you think, Scully."

That raises her hackles and she asks coldly, "And what is it that I think?"

"That I'm holed up in here hunting UFOs and aliens and that I barely notice you or me or our lives over all the monsters and sightings and conspiracies."

She scrunches the corners of her mouth down and raises her brows in a traditional "can't argue with that" maneuver.

"But it's not about that anymore, Scully. It's not, present decor aside. I don't simply want to believe, I only want the truth."

"Then why did you buy that poster again?"

"Nostalgia," he says with a shrug. "And a little for motivation. But once it was on the wall I knew it was for something else entirely."

"Which is…."

"You're gone all day, Scully. Nearly every day. Double digit hours. Sometimes you're even at work overnight."

"I have a job, Mulder."

"I know. That's a good thing for many reasons. But when you're not here, I--." He pauses awkwardly. "I don't feel right."

"Like I said, I have a--"

"I know, I know. But Scully, don’t you ever wonder at how we ended up here? Really wonder? I just--. We just--." He shakes his head and shifts his eyes away from her. "I'm so lucky to have you. I never forget that. Never. I put an X down every day on the calendar to mark our time, haven't you seen? But it can still be difficult to believe. You, me, us, together, here. But I want to believe."

He looks at her again. Her arms aren't crossed anymore, she's moved close enough to the poster to lay her hand on it, and her eyes are that hazy blue they only get when she's feeling love so sincere she can't say it in so many words out loud. At least that's how he's settled over time on decoding that look.

He stands, reaching for her at the same time she's moving warm into his space, cheek on his chest.

"Believe," is all she says.


End file.
